Contents

In an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator Dolkart recalled that he first became interested in Historic Preservation in his first year of graduate studies in Art History.[2] Dolkart has had a continuous presence in the preservation field in New York since he graduated from the Historic Preservation program at Columbia in 1977. In 2014 he received the Historic District Council's Landmarks Lion award. He has authored many of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's reports and served as an editor for the first edition of the Guide to New York City Landmarks.
In 2008 he was named Director of the program in Historic Preservation at Columbia University,[3] a position previously held by James Marston Fitch (1964–1977), Robert A.M. Stern, and Paul Spencer Byard (1998–2008). In 2009 he was awarded tenure, becoming the second tenured Director in the history of the Historic Preservation program. He served as director until 2016. Along with Jay Shockley and Ken Lustbader, Dolkart is a founding member of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, begun in 2015. He is currently a Project Director.

In his teaching and writing Dolkart stresses the importance of Vernacular architecture based more on commercial need than strictly stylistic preferences. Much of his work emphasizes the practical and economic aspects of buildings, whether they were constructed to meet the needs of the garment industry, tenement housing, or high-end housing designed primarily to meet the profit objectives of speculative real estate developers. His presentation style uses humor and irony: "I trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower," Dolkart writes in the forward to Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street. "Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born in 1914 to Russian-Jewish immigrants." On its webpage describing Dolkart's book, a staff writer from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum states, "For Dolkart, the experience of being raised in a tenement became a metaphor for the life that was afforded countless thousands of other immigrant children growing up in Lower Manhattan during the past century and more. Dolkart presents for us a precise and informative biography of a typical tenement house in New York City that became, in 1988, the site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum...This book is a lasting tribute to the legacy of immigrants and their children, who were part of the transformation of New York City and the fabric of everyday American urban life." In 2009, Dolkart published "The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1909-1929," a pioneering study of the rediscovery and redesign of run-down urban row houses in the early 20th century and the creation of an entirely new type of urban housing. This award-winning book is both an investigation of this important movement in New York real estate and housing history and an advocacy piece seeking an appreciation for and preservation of these houses.

Lower Hudson Conference of Historical Agencies and Museums. Award for Excellence in archival-based scholarship, 2002, for "Central Synagogue in Its Changing Neighborhood."

Victorian Society in America New York Chapter. Award for contributions to the preservation of New York’s Victorian built environment, 1999.

Winner, Association of American Publishers's 1998 Award for Excellence in Professional/Scholarly Publishing, Best Book in Architecture and Urban Planning for "Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development."